Electronic bill payment systems and digital wallets have been known for decades, and digital wallets have become their own category of service with many providers administering these means of storing digital representations of traditionally paper or plastic objects like: forms of payment (credit and debit cards), loyalty cards, coupons, event tickets and membership cards (digital wallet individual customer e-cards). However, bill providers and other bill paying entities do not currently allow for the presentment, payment or management of bills and billing relationships with customers within these digital wallets. As such, consumers cannot currently receive, review, manage or pay bills within digital wallet applications. Examples of prior mobile payment systems may be found, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,609,113, 8,180,705, 8,527,413, and 8,583,548, and in U.S. Patent App. Pub. No. 2013/0144789, the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. In the known patented systems, it is evident that bills can be paid electronically, such as through an electronic funds transfer (EFT) and other electronic payment options which may use a credit card, a debit card, a bank account or other funding or credit accounts residing in a financial institution. The payments may be made by the various means described in the references, such as through an app on a smart-phone or other mobile device or a web browser on a tablet or personal computer.
Generally, even when there is an established billing and payment relationship between a biller and a customer, to electronically pay bills, the burden is placed on the customer to set up an electronic payment relationship with the biller within one of the customer's credit accounts or in a special account within the biller's system (that connects to one of the customer's credit accounts) or within some third party system which connects the customer's biller accounts with the customer's credit accounts. In some instances, the system can be an application that is available from the biller, a financial institution (such as a credit card company or a bank), or a third party which the user must first download into their smart-phone or other mobile device as a unique mobile app. In other cases, the systems are available through web browsers. However, although a customer may already have established an electronic relationship with a credit account holder and another electronic relationship with a biller, these previous systems make no attempt to create the connection for the customer between the existing electronic relationships. Instead, as indicated above, the customer has the burden to create the connection in one of the systems.
Although digital wallets and electronic bill pay systems at the customer user level have been known for more than twenty years, as indicated by U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,590,197 and 5,465,206, there has still been no attempt to provide customers with a payment platform in which they can easily connect their existing electronic relationships with their billers (i.e., providers of goods and/or services) to their existing electronic relationships with the financial institutions in which they have their credit and funding accounts. In particular, even though there have been various digital wallet applications that customers have been able to use for their own individual customer e-cards, there has been no way for these customers to pay their bills and manage their bill payments within their digital wallet applications. Similarly, from the billers' perspectives, there has been no way to connect with their customers through the customers' digital wallet applications even when they have an established electronic relationship with their customers. Accordingly, there remains a need in the electronic bill pay systems and digital wallet systems to provide customers with a bridge between existing electronic relationships that they have established with billers and financial institutions.